Quotes from Virginia Woolf's Book "To the Lightouse" published in 1927 Virginia Woolf (Adeline Virginia Stephen), from Hyde Park Lane, London (1882 - 1941) was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period , Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" was first published in 1927. Woolf was experimenting with fiction, using psychoanalysis. She wrote, "I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotions. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest." "What is the meaning of life?

That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.” “To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!” “For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone." “For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge” SparkNotes: To the Lighthouse: Context To the Lighthouse Table of Contents Plot Overview Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882, a descendant of one of Victorian England’s most prestigious literary families.

Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and was married to the daughter of the writer William Thackeray. Woolf grew up among the most important and influential British intellectuals of her time, and received free rein to explore her father’s library. Her personal connections and abundant talent soon opened doors for her. Woolf wrote that she found herself in “a position where it was easier on the whole to be eminent than obscure.” Almost from the beginning, her life was a precarious balance of extraordinary success and mental instability. As a young woman, Woolf wrote for the prestigious Times Literary Supplement, and as an adult she quickly found herself at the center of England’s most important literary community. Known as the “Bloomsbury Group” after the section of London in which its members lived, this group of writers, artists, and philosophers emphasized nonconformity, aesthetic pleasure, and intellectual freedom, and included such luminaries as the painter Lytton Strachey, the novelist E. M. Forster, the composer Benjamin Britten, and the economist John Maynard Keynes.

Working among such an inspirational group of peers and possessing an incredible talent in her own right, Woolf published her most famous novels by the mid-1920s, including The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and To the Lighthouse. With these works she reached the pinnacle of her profession. Woolf’s life was equally dominated by mental illness. Her parents died when she was young—her mother in 1895 and her father in 1904—and she was prone to intense, terrible headaches and emotional breakdowns. After her father’s death, she attempted suicide, throwing herself out a window. Though she married Leonard Woolf in 1912 and loved him deeply, she was not entirely satisfied romantically or sexually. For years she sustained an intimate relationship with the novelist Vita Sackville-West. Late in life, Woolf became terrified by the idea that another nervous breakdown was close at hand, one from which she would not recover. On March 28, 1941, she wrote her husband a note stating that she did not wish to spoil his life by going mad. She then drowned herself in the River Ouse.

Woolf’s writing bears the mark of her literary pedigree as well as her struggle to find meaning in her own unsteady existence. Written in a poised, understated, and elegant style, her work examines the structures of human life, from the nature of relationships to the experience of time. Yet her writing also addresses issues relevant to her era and literary circle. Throughout her work she celebrates and analyzes the Bloomsbury values of aestheticism, feminism, and independence. Moreover, her stream-of-consciousness style was influenced by, and responded to, the work of the French thinker Henri Bergson and the novelists Marcel Proust and James Joyce. This style allows the subjective mental processes of Woolf’s characters to determine the objective content of her narrative. In To the Lighthouse (1927), one of her most experimental works, the passage of time, for example, is modulated by the consciousness of the characters rather than by the clock. The events of a single afternoon constitute over half the book, while the events of the following ten years are compressed into a few dozen pages. Many readers of To the Lighthouse, especially those who are not versed in the traditions of modernist fiction, find the novel strange and difficult.

Its language is dense and the structure amorphous. Compared with the plot-driven Victorian novels that came before it, To the Lighthouse seems to have little in the way of action. Indeed, almost all of the events take place in the characters’ minds. Although To the Lighthouse is a radical departure from the nineteenth-century novel, it is, like its more traditional counterparts, intimately interested in developing characters and advancing both plot and themes. Woolf’s experimentation has much to do with the time in which she lived: the turn of the century was marked by bold scientific developments. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution undermined an unquestioned faith in God that was, until that point, nearly universal, while the rise of psychoanalysis, a movement led by Sigmund Freud, introduced the idea of an unconscious mind. Such innovation in ways of scientific thinking had great influence on the styles and concerns of contemporary artists and writers like those in the Bloomsbury Group. To the Lighthouse exemplifies Woolf’s style and many of her concerns as a novelist. With its characters based on her own parents and siblings, it is certainly her most autobiographical fictional statement, and in the characters of Mr. Ramsay, Mrs.

Ramsay, and Lily Briscoe, Woolf offers some of her most penetrating explorations of the workings of the human consciousness as it perceives and analyzes, feels and interacts. More Help To the Lighthouse Essay - To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf - eNotes.com To the Lighthouse Essay - To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf (Full name Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf) English novelist, essayist, and diarist. The following entry presents criticism of Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927). See also, Virginia Woolf Criticism. One of the most prominent literary figures of the twentieth century, Woolf is widely admired for her technical innovations in the novel, most notably her development of stream-of-consciousness narrative. In To the Lighthouse (1927) Woolf sought to come to terms with her parents' stifling Victorian marriage and events of her own childhood, as well as to explore such feminist issues as the necessity, or even desirability, of marriage for women and the difficulties for women in pursuing a career in the arts.

A striking mix of autobiographical elements, philosophical questions, and social concerns, To the Lighthouse is generally considered to be Woolf’s greatest fictional achievement. Plot and Major Characters To the Lighthouse is divided into three parts: “The Window,” “Time Passes,” and “The Lighthouse.” Despite the inherent complexities of Woolf's many themes and stream-of-consciousness narrative, the plot of the novel is simple. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, their children, and numerous house guests—including Lily Briscoe, the central consciousness of “The Lighthouse” section—are vacationing in the remote Hebrides islands. An expedition to a nearby lighthouse is put off by Mr. Ramsay, and ten years later, after the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay and two of the Ramsays' children, the trip is successfully executed by Mr. Ramsay and his children James and Cam. “The Window” is the longest section of the book, but it takes place in a single day and focuses primarily on the character Mrs. Ramsay, a beautiful, placid, upper-middle-class Victorian wife and mother who devotes herself to family and friends.

The years between the planned trip to the lighthouse and the actual event are poetically recounted in the short section “Time Passes,” in which the effects of time are illustrated in a description of the slow decay of the Ramsays’ empty vacation home, combined with flashes of imagery of World War I, the physical aging of the characters, and death. Lily Briscoe becomes the dominant character in the third section, “The Lighthouse.” A struggling artist who never married—despite Mrs. Ramsay’s attempts to play matchmaker for her—Lily mourns the loss of Mrs. Ramsay, whom she alternately adores and misunderstands, and attempts to resolve her feelings about Mr. Ramsay, whom she considers at times overly philosophical, arrogant, and detached. Lily also must come to terms with her own decision not to marry and to pursue work as an artist, despite social pressure to lead a more conventional life. In the final scene of the novel, Mr. Ramsay and his children reach the lighthouse at last, and Lily finishes the painting she has been working on throughout the novel, both acts signifying the characters’ attainment of an integrated vision of life, art, and death.

Major Themes After the novel’s publication, Woolf wrote of her depiction of her parents’ marriage in To the Lighthouse, “I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; and writing of them was a necessary act.” Her own mother had died suddenly when Woolf was thirteen. Considered a model wife and mother, Julia Stephen was known to exhaust herself regularly to please her demanding husband, the writer and intellectual figure Leslie Stephen. But Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are heavily fictionalized portrayals of Woolf’s parents, and neither they nor the other characters in To the Lighthouse are meant to fully represent the Stephen family; rather, they are extremely complex, symbolic, and, some say, mythical figures who are not easily categorized. Literary theorists are sharply divided over the deeper meanings of Woolf’s characters. Some interpret Mrs. Ramsay as the embodiment of the feminine ideal and Mr. Ramsay as that of the masculine ideal—the pure, elemental forces of the genders.

Feminist critics dispute this notion, positing instead that the Ramsays’ marriage is typical of most marriages in the pre-World War I period, forcing the wife into the role of “angel of the house”—unquestioning, supportive, generous, and self-sacrificing at any cost to personal ambition and satisfaction. These critics consider Mr. Ramsay an overbearing and domineering patriarch who drives his wife to the brink of feeble-mindedness. Still others surmise just the opposite: namely, that Mrs. Ramsay is a cold-hearted, social-climbing harpy, and Mr. Ramsay a hen-pecked husband. Regardless of conflicting interpretations of the Ramsays, Lily Briscoe is generally considered representative of Woolf’s strong feminist principles, particularly in her refusal to marry and her commitment to painting, despite the urging of others to abandon art. Overriding concerns of To the Lighthouse and all of its characters are death, mourning, and the inexorable passage of time. When Mrs. Ramsay dies, she takes with her the sense of order in the family; children die, Lily and Mr. Ramsay fall into abiding grief, and even the house itself declines into disrepair.

The consummation of the trip to the lighthouse and Lily’s completion of her painting, with a single line down the center representing Mrs. Ramsay, signify the triumph of order over disorder and life over death and grief. Critical Reception To the Lighthouse has sustained critical predominance in Woolf’s canon since its publication in 1927. It is widely considered her most successful use of stream-of-consciousness narrative, nonlinear plot, and interior monologue, crisply identifying characters without the formal structure of chronological time and omniscient narration, as well as her most perfectly realized fictional reflection on mortality, subjectivity, and the passage of time. The novel is often described as an elegy to Woolf’s mother, and as such it is thought to be a complex and poetic character study, incorporating all facets of personality, including emotions dark and hopeless. In her diary Woolf recorded her many difficulties in writing To the Lighthouse, including her fears about reliving her parents’ deaths—events that precipitated two of her most devastating emotional breakdowns.

But Woolf evidently realized the greater significance of To the Lighthouse beyond its fictional portrayal of her childhood; in a diary entry written during her final revision of the novel in 1926 she wrote, “My present opinion is that it is easily the best of my books,” an assessment with which most critics agree. More Content: To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (hide) Virginia Woolf - Modernism Lab Essays Virginia Woolf by Jessica Svendsen and Pericles Lewis Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist. Woolf was a prolific writer, whose modernist style changed with each new novel. [1] Her letters and memoirs reveal glimpses of Woolf at the center of English literary culture during the Bloomsbury era. Woolf represents a historical moment when art was integrated into society, as T.S. Eliot describes in his obituary for Virginia.

“Without Virginia Woolf at the center of it, it would have remained formless or marginal…With the death of Virginia Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken.” [2] Virginia Adeline Stephen was the third child of Leslie Stephen, a Victorian man of letters, and Julia Duckworth. The Stephen family lived at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, a respectable English middle class neighborhood. While her brothers Thoby and Adrian were sent to Cambridge, Virginia was educated by private tutors and copiously read from her father’s vast library of literary classics. She later resented the degradation of women in a patriarchal society, rebuking her own father for automatically sending her brothers to schools and university, while she was never offered a formal education. [3] Woolf’s Victorian upbringing would later influence her decision to participate in the Bloomsbury circle, noted for their original ideas and unorthodox relationships. As biographer Hermione Lee argues “Woolf was a ‘modern’. But she was also a late Victorian. The Victorian family past filled her fiction, shaped her political analyses of society and underlay the behaviour of her social group.” [4] Mental Illness In May 1895 , Virginia’s mother died from rheumatic fever.

Her unexpected and tragic death caused Virginia to have a mental breakdown at age 13. A second severe breakdown followed the death of her father, Leslie Stephen, in 1904. During this time, Virginia first attempted suicide and was institutionalized. According to nephew and biographer Quentin Bell, “All that summer she was mad.” [5] The death of her close brother Thoby Stephen, from typhoid fever in November 1906 had a similar effect on Woolf, to such a degree that he would later be re-imagined as Jacob in her first experimental novel Jacob’s Room and later as Percival in The Waves. These were the first of her many mental collapses that would sporadically occur throughout her life, until her suicide in March 1941. Though Woolf’s mental illness was periodic and recurrent, as Lee explains, she “was a sane woman who had an illness.” [6] Her “madness” was provoked by life-altering events, notably family deaths, her marriage, or the publication of a novel. According to Lee, Woolf’s symptoms conform to the profile of a manic-depressive illness, or bipolar disorder.

Leonard, her dedicated lifelong companion, documented her illness with scrupulousness. He categorized her breakdowns into two distinct stages: “In the manic stage she was extremely excited; the mind race; she talked volubly and, at the height of the attach, incoherently; she had delusions and heard voices…she was violent with her nurses. In her third attack, which began in 1914, this stage lasted for several months and ended by her falling into a coma for two days. During the depressive stage all her thoughts and emotions were the exact opposite of what they had been in the manic stage. She was in the depths of melancholia and despair; she scarcely spoke; refused to eat; refused to believe that she was ill and insisted that her condition was due to her own guilt; at the height of this stage she tried to commit suicide.” [7] During her life, Woolf consulted at least twelve doctors, and consequently experienced, from the Victorian era to the shell shock of World War I, the emerging medical trends for treating the insane.

Woolf frequently heard the medical jargon used for a “nervous breakdown,” and incorporated the language of medicine, degeneracy, and eugenics into her novel Mrs. Dalloway . With the character Septimus Smith, Woolf combined her doctor’s terminology with her own unstable states of mind. When Woolf prepared to write Mrs. Dalloway, she envisioned the novel as a “study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side.” When she was editing the manuscript, she changed her depiction of Septimus from what read like a record of her own experience as a “mental patient” into a more abstracted character and narrative. However, she kept the “exasperation,” which she noted, should be the “dominant theme” of Septimus’s encounters with doctors. [8] Bloomsbury Virginia began to teach English literature and history at an adult-education college in London, in addition to writing articles and reviews for publications, including The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, and The National Review. Woolf continued her journalistic endeavors throughout her life, reviewing contemporary and classical literature in modernist reviews like the Athenaeum, The Dial and The Criterion.

It was also during this time that Woolf became close friends with young men who shared and stimulated her intellectual interests. The majority of these friends her brother Thoby met at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1899 , including Lytton Strachey , Leonard Woolf, and Clive Bell. This group started meeting for ‘Thursday Evenings’ at Gordon Square, London in 1906, which was soon followed by Vanessa Bell’s ‘Friday Club,’ to discuss the arts. With the emergence of these two literary and artistic circles, the unofficial ‘Bloomsbury Group’ came into existence. [9] In 1924 , during the heyday of literary modernism, Virginia Woolf tried to account for what was new about “modern” fiction.

She wrote that while all fiction tried to express human character, modern fiction had to describe character in a new way because “on or about December, 1910, human character changed.” Her main example of this change in human character was the “character of one’s cook.” Whereas the “Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths,” modern cooks were forever coming out of the kitchen to borrow the Daily Herald and ask “advice about a hat.” Woolf’s choice of December, 1910 as a watershed referred above all to the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition, organized by her friend Roger Fry in collaboration with her brother-in-law Clive Bell. The exhibition ran from November 8, 1910 to January 15, 1911 and introduced the English public to developments in the visual arts that had already been taking place in France for a generation. More broadly, however, Woolf was alluding to social and political changes that overtook England soon after the death of Edward VII in May, 1910, symbolized by the changing patterns of deference and class and gender relations implicit in the transformation of the Victorian cook.

Henry James considered that the death of Edward’s mother Victoria meant the end of one age; Edward’s reign was short (1901-1910), but to those who lived through it, it seemed to stand at the border between the old world and the new. This sense of the radical difference between the "modern" world and the "Edwardian" one, or more broadly the world before and after the First World War, became a major theme of Woolf's fiction. In 1911, the year after human character changed, Virginia decided to live in a house in the Bloomsbury neighborhood near the British Museum with several men, none of whom was her husband. Some of her relatives were shocked, and her father’s old friend Henry James found her lifestyle rather too Bohemian. Her housemates were her brother Adrian, John Maynard Keynes , Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf, whom she married a year later. Grant and Keynes were lovers, and the heterosexual members of the group too were known for their unconventional relationships. Virginia’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, lived for much of her life with Grant, who was also her artistic collaborator, and the two had a daughter.

Throughout all this, Vanessa remained married to Clive Bell, who early in marriage had a flirtatious relationship with Virginia, while Duncan had a series of homosexual love affairs. Most of the men in the Bloomsbury group had gone to Cambridge, and many had belonged to an intellectual club called the Apostles, which, under the influence of the philosopher G. E. Moore, emphasized the importance of friendship and aesthetic experience, a more earnest form of Oscar Wilde’s aestheticism. A typical Bloomsbury figure, Lytton Strachey , wrote his best-known book, Eminent Victorians ( 1918 ), in a satirical vein, debunking the myths surrounding such revered figures as Florence Nightingale. Strachey was the most open homosexual of the group, and Woolf vividly recalled his destruction of all the Victorian proprieties when he noted a stain on Vanessa’s dress and remarked, “Semen”: “With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down." Feminist Critiques Woolf wrote extensively on the problem of women’s access to the learned professions, such as academia, the church, the law, and medicine, a problem that was exacerbated by women’s exclusion from Oxford and Cambridge.

Woolf herself never went to university, and she resented the fact that her brothers and male friends had had an opportunity that was denied to her. Even in the realm of literature, Woolf found, women in literary families like her own were expected to write memoirs of their fathers or to edit their correspondence. Woolf did in fact write a memoir of her father, Leslie Stephen, after his death, but she later wrote that if he had not died when she was relatively young (22), she never would have become a writer. Woolf also concerned herself with the question of women’s equality with men in marriage, and she brilliantly evoked the inequality of her parents’ marriage in her novel To the Lighthouse ( 1927 ). Woolf based the Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay on her parents. Vanessa Bell immediately decoded the novel, discovering that Mrs. Ramsay was based on their mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen.

Vanessa felt that it was “almost painful to have her so raised from the dead.” [10] Woolf’s mother was always eager to fulfill the Victorian ideal that Woolf later described, in a figure borrowed from a pious Victorian poem, as that of the “Angel in the House.” Woolf spoke of her partly successful attempts to kill off the “Angel in the House,” and to describe the possibilities for emancipated women independently of her mother’s sense of the proprieties. The disparity Woolf saw in her parents’ marriage made her determined that “the man she married would be as worthy of her as she of him. They were to be equal partners.” [11] Despite numerous marriage proposals throughout her young adulthood, including offers by Lytton Strachey and Sydney Waterlow, Virginia only hesitated with Leonard Woolf, a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service. Virginia wavered, partly due to her fear of marriage and the emotional and sexual involvement the partnership requires. She wrote to Leonard: “As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock.

And yet your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me. It is so real, and so strange.” [12] Virginia eventually accepted him, and at age 30, she married Leonard Woolf in August 1912. For two or three years, they shared a bed, and for several more a bedroom. However, with Virginia’s unstable mental condition, they followed medical advice and did not have children. Related to the unequal status of marriage was the sexual double standard that treated lack of chastity in a woman as a serious social offense. Woolf herself was almost certainly the victim of some kind of sexual abuse at the hands of one of her half-brothers, as narrated in her memoir Moments of Being. More broadly, she was highly conscious of the ways that men had access to and knowledge of sex, whereas women of the middle and upper classes were expected to remain ignorant of it. She often puzzled about the possibility of a literature that would treat sexuality and especially the sexual life of women frankly, but her own works discuss sex rather indirectly.

If much of Woolf’s feminist writing concerns the problem of equality of access to goods that have traditionally been monopolized by men, her literary criticism prefigures two other concerns of later feminism: the reclaiming of a female tradition of writing and the deconstruction of gender difference. In A Room of One’s Own ( 1929 ), Woolf imagines the fate of Shakespeare’s equally brilliant sister Judith (in fact, his sister’s name was Joan). Unable to gain access to the all-male stage of Elizabethan England, or to obtain any formal education, Judith would have been forced to marry and abandon her literary gifts or, if she had chosen to run away from home, would have been driven to prostitution. Woolf traces the rise of women writers, emphasizing in particular Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot, but alluding too to Sappho, one of the first lyric poets.

Faced with the question of whether women’s writing is specifically feminine, she concludes that the great female authors “wrote as women write, not as men write.” She thus raises the possibility of a specifically feminine style, but at the same time she emphasizes (citing the authority of Coleridge) that the greatest writers, among whom she includes Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Marcel Proust , are androgynous, able to see the world equally from a man’s and a woman’s perspective. The Effect of War The theme of how to make sense of the changes wrought in English society by the war, specifically from the perspective of a woman who had not seen battle, became central to Woolf's work. In her short story “Mrs.

Dalloway in Bond Street” ( 1922 ), Woolf has her society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway, observe that since the war, “there are moments when it seems utterly futile…—simply one doesn’t believe, thought Clarissa, any more in God.” Although her first novel, The Voyage Out ( 1915 ) had tentatively embraced modernist techniques, her second, Night and Day ( 1919 ), returned to many Victorian conventions. The young modernist writer Katherine Mansfield thought that Night and Day contained “a lie in the soul” because it failed to refer to the war or recognize what it had meant for fiction. Mansfield, who had written a number of important early modernist stories, died at the age of 34 in 1923, and Woolf, who had published some of her work at the Hogarth Press , often measured herself against this friend and rival.

Mansfield’s criticism of Night and Day as “Jane Austen up-to-date” stung Woolf, who, in three of her major modernist novels of the 1920s, grappled with the problem of how to represent the gap in historical experience presented by the war. The war is a central theme in her three major modernist novels of the 1920s: Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927). Over the course of the decade, these novels trace the experience of incorporating the massive and incomprehensible experience of the war into a vision of recent history. Hogarth Press In 1915, Leonard and Virginia moved to Hogarth House, Richmond, and two years later, brought a printing press in order to establish a small, independent publishing house. Though the physical machining required by letterpress exhausted the Woolfs, the Hogarth Press flourished throughout their careers. Hogarth chiefly printed Bloomsbury authors who had little chance of being accepted at established publishing companies.

The Woolfs were dedicated to publishing the most experimental prose and poetry and the emerging philosophical, political, and scientific ideas of the day. They published T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster , Roger Fry, Katherine Mansfield, Clive Bell, Vita Sackville-West, and John Middleton Murry, among numerous others. Though they rejected publishing James Joyce ’s Ulysses , they printed T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the first English translations of Sigmund Freud. Hogarth additionally published all of Woolf’s novels, providing her the editorial freedom to do as she wished as a woman writer, free from the criticism of a male editor. J.H. Willis explains that Woolf “could experiment boldly, remaking the form and herself each time she shaped a new fiction, responsible only to herself as writer-editor-publisher…She was, [Woolf] added triumphantly, ‘the only woman in England free to write what I like.’ The press, beyond doubt, had given Virginia a room of her own.” [13] Female Relations Woolf’s liberated writing parallels her relationships with women, who gave her warm companionship and literary stimulus.

In her girlhood, there was Violet Dickinson; in her thirties, Katherine Mansfield; and in her fifties, there was Ethel Smyth. But none of these women emotionally aroused Virginia as did Vita Sackville-West. They met in 1922, and it developed into the deepest relationship that Virginia would ever have outside her family. [14] Virginia and Vita were more different than alike; but their differences in social class, sexual orientation, and politics, were all were part of the attraction. Vita was an outsider to Bloomsbury and disapproved of their literary gatherings. Though the two had different intellectual backgrounds, Virginia found Vita irresistible with her glamorous and aristocratic demeanor. Virginia felt that Vita was “a real woman. Then there is some voluptuousness about her; the grapes are ripe; & not reflective. No. In brain & insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of this, & so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always wished from everyone.” [15] Though Vita and Virginia shared intimate relations, they both avoided categorizing their relationship as lesbian.

Vita rejected the lesbian political identity and even Woolf’s feminism. Instead, Vita was well-known in her social circles as a “Sapphist.” Virginia, on the other hand, did not define herself as a Sapphist. She avoided all categories, particular those that categorized her in a group defined by sexual behavior. [16] Woolf’s relationship with Vita ultimately shaped the fictional biography Orlando , a narrative that spans from 1500 to the contemporary day. It follows the protagonist Orlando who is based on “Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another.” [17] For Virginia, Vita’s physical appearance embodied both the masculine and the feminine, and she wrote to Vita that Orlando is “all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind.” Though Virginia and Vita’s love affair only lasted intermittently for about three years, Woolf wrote Orlando as an “elaborate love-letter, rendering Vita androgynous and immortal, transforming her story into a myth.” [18] Indeed, Woolf’s ideal of the androgynous mind is extended in Orlando to an androgynous body.

When it was published in October 1928, Orlando immediately became a bestseller and the novel’s success made Woolf one of the best-known contemporary writers. In the same month, Woolf gave the two lectures at Cambridge, later published as A Room of One’s Own (1929), and actively participated in the legal battles that censored Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness. Despite this concentrated period of reflection on gender and sexual identities, Woolf would wait until 1938 to publish Three Guineas, a text that expands her feminist critique on the patriarchy and militarism. Suicide The Bloomsbury Group gradually dispersed, beginning with the death of Lytton Strachey in 1932 and the suicide of his long-time partner Dora Carrington shortly thereafter. Virginia felt the loss of Lytton acutely in her life and her writing; years later she still thought as she wrote, ‘Oh but he won’t read this!” Roger Fry’s death in 1934 also affected Woolf, to such a degree that she would later write his biography (1940). As her friends died, she felt her own life begin to crumble.

In January 1941, Woolf became severely depressed, partly due to the strain of completing her novel Between the Acts. She distrusted her publisher’s praise of the novel; she felt it was “too slight and sketchy.” She instead wanted to delay publication, deciding that it required extensive revision. Yet during this time, Woolf began feeling that she had lost her art; she felt if she could no longer write, she could no longer fully exist. It was “a conviction that her whole purpose in life had gone. What was the point in living if she was never again to understand the shape of the world around or, or be able to describe it?” [19] Woolf clearly expressed her reasons for committing suicide in her last letter to her husband Leonard: “I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we cant go through another of those terrible times. And I shant recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate.” [20] On March 18, she may have attempted to drown herself.

Over a week later on March 28, Virginia wrote the third of her suicide letters, and walked the half-mile to the River Ouse, filled her pockets with stones, and walked into the water. [21] Virginia's body was found by some children, a short way down-stream, almost a month later on April 18. An inquest was held the next day and the verdict was "Suicide with the balance of her mind disturbed." Her body was cremated on April 21 with only Leonard present, and her ashes were buried under a great elm tree just outside the garden at Monk's House, with the concluding words of The Waves as her epitaph, "Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!" [22] The last words Virginia Woolf wrote were “Will you destroy all my papers.” [23] Written in the margin of her second suicide letter to Leonard, it is unclear what “papers” he was supposed to destroy—the typescript of her latest novel Between the Acts; the first chapter of Anon, a project on the history of English literature; or her prolific diaries and letters.

If Woolf wished for all of these papers to be destroyed, Leonard disregarded her instructions. He published her novel, compiled significant diary entries into the volume The Writer’s Diary, and carefully kept all of her manuscripts, diaries, letters, thereby preserving Woolf’s unique voice and personality captured in each line. ↑ Spender, Stephen. “Virginia Woolf’s Obituary Notice.” Listener. 10 April 1941. ↑ Eliot, T.S. “Virginia Woolf’s Obituary.” Horizon. May 1941. ↑ Nicolson, Nigel. Introduction to The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume One: 1888-1912. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975. ↑ Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1990. 55 ↑ Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1990. ↑ Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1990. 171. ↑ Ibid 174. ↑ Ibid 188. ↑ Nicolson, Nigel.

The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume One: 1888-1912. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975. 183. ↑ Ibid 572. ↑ Nicolson, Nigel. Introduction to The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume One: 1888-1912. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975. ↑ Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume One: 1888-1912. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975. 1 May 1912. ↑ Willis, J. H. Leonard and Virginia Woolf As Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917-41. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1992. 400. ↑ Nicolson, Nigel. Introduction to The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three: 1923-1928. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977. ↑ Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 3: 1925-1930.

New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980. 51. ↑ Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1990. 484. ↑ Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 3: 1925-1930. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980. 428. ↑ Nicolson, Nigel. Introduction to The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three: 1923-1928. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977. ↑ Nicolson, Nigel. Introduction to The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Six: 1936-1941. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980. ↑ Ibid 486. Lecture 5 Basic Orientation to the Novel Next to Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse (1927) is Woolfï¿½s most loved and most studied novel. She began writing it almost as soon as Mrs. Dalloway was published, and she uses some of the same narrative techniques she developed in Mrs.

Dalloway, notably the kind of stream of consciousness that scholars call ï¿½free indirect discourse.ï¿½ This narrative technique allows the perspective to move from one characterï¿½s mind to another, sometimes ambiguously. Mitchell Leaska has identified 17 different ï¿½angles of perspectiveï¿½ in the novel (quoting Mark Hussey, Virginia Woolf: A-Z, p 314). The book is in three parts: The Window, Time Passes, and The Lighthouse. The Window takes place on a few days at a summer house on a seacoast, ostensibly the Hebrides (the island of Skye, off the coast of Scotland, see p 7), but described more like the small Cornish town of St. Ives, where Woolf spent every childhood summer till she was 13. Here we meet Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay (we never learn their first names), their eight children, and their house guests.

The Ramsayï¿½s youngest son James, age 6, wants to visit the lighthouse they can see from the window, and this thwarted ï¿½questï¿½ is about as much plot as there is. In the short middle section, ï¿½Time Passes,ï¿½ the Ramsayï¿½s oldest son, Andrew, is killed in World War I, their oldest daughter Prue dies in childbirth, and Mrs. Ramsayï¿½who has been the dominant character in The Window-- herself dies. All of this is reported from a radically different perspective than Woolf used in The Window. Instead of moving intimately into peopleï¿½s minds, Time Passes is told from a detached perspective that never enters anyoneï¿½s mind. It is almost as though we were watching a fast forward of a videocam focused on the house itself, and what happens to the people who had lived there is incidental. Mrs. Ramsayï¿½s death, for example, is reported in square brackets at the end of chapter 3 (p 128).

It is a perspective Woolf would develop more fully in her most experimental novel, The Waves (1931), in which there is no clearly defined narrator, and the characters are more like voices than embodied people. Part 3, The Lighthouse, takes us back to the multiple perspectives of part 1. It is ten years later, and the remaining Ramsays have returned to the house for the first time since part 1. Some of the same house guests are there, notably Lily Briscoe, an amateur painter who had spent much of part 1 trying to paint a picture of Mrs. Ramsay sitting in the window with James. In this final part, Lily finishes her painting at the same moment that Mr. Ramsay, James, and Cam (the youngest Ramsay daughter) reach the lighthouse. Plot summary does little to convey what makes To the Lighthouse one of the great novels of the 20th century.

Eudora Weltyï¿½s foreword to the 1981 Harcourt edition (an excellent introduction to the novel) describes some of what makes it great: ï¿½No matter how often we begin it again, it seems to expand and expand again ahead of usï¿½ (vii). One of the most influential readings of the novel is by Erich Auerbach Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946; trans English 1953). His final chapter focuses entirely on To the Lighthouse as his example of Modernism, a major change in the relation of art to reality. He analyzes chapter 5 (part I, beginning ï¿½never did anybody look so sadï¿½) and discusses who is speaking; what is reality and what is the interior voice. The result of Auerbachï¿½s analysis was to focus scholarly attention on Woolf as a Modernist, especially on her narrative technique. (ï¿½The Brown Stockingï¿½ is the way Auerbachï¿½s chapter is usually reprinted, the most often reprinted article about Woolf.) As in Mrs.

Dalloway, more is going on inside than outside. Autobiography To the Lighthouse is Woolfï¿½s most autobiographical novel, especially in recreating her parents in her depiction of the Ramsays. (See details of characters based on Woolfï¿½s family at .) In some respects, writing the novel was an exorcism, for Woolf had been haunted by her motherï¿½s memory and felt that in writing this book she finally laid her to rest. Here is how she puts it in ï¿½A Sketch of the Past,ï¿½ an unfinished autobiography written in 1939-40 and later published in Moments of Being (1976): Until I was in the fortiesï¿½I could settle the date by seeing when I wrote To the Lighthouse, but am too casual here to bother to do itï¿½the presence of my mother obsessed me. I could hear her voice, see her, imagine what she would do or say as I went about my dayï¿½s doings. She was one of the invisible presences who after all play so important a part in every life. . . .

Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse, in a great, apparently involuntary, rush. One thing burst into another. . . . I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her. I suppose that I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest. But what is the meaning of ï¿½explainedï¿½ it? (80-81; Woolf was 45 when she began writing To the Lighthouse in 1925) To underline the connection with her mother, Woolf arranged to have the book published on the date of her motherï¿½s death, May 5, 1925 (Julia Stephen died May 5, 1895).

See Maria DiBattistaï¿½s 1980 essay on the novel for an analysis of how Woolf uses the novel to make peace with her parents, both of them long dead when she was writing. See Jane Lilienfeldï¿½s 1977 essay, " 'The Deceptiveness of Beauty,' " for an analysis of Woolfï¿½s connection to Lily Briscoe and how Woolf uses this to work out her feelings about her dead mother. Of course, To the Lighthouse (TTL for short) is much more than memoir disguised as novel. I like what Eudora Welty says about the autobiographical element in this novel: ï¿½what connects To the Lighthouse to autobiography seems meteorological in nature. Not slow recollection so much as a bolt of lightning runs between them; we enter a world that is lit by its flash and play and under its heavenly signs is transformedï¿½ (foreword to Harcourt Brace edition, p vii).

To the Lighthouse by Woolf - AbeBooks To the Lighthouse by Woolf You Searched For: Results (1 - 30) of 133 1 ISBN 10: 1853260916 ISBN 13: 9781853260919 New Paperback Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Paperback. Book Condition: New. Not Signed; With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading. This simple and haunting story captures the transcience of life and its surrounding emotions. To the Lighthouse is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels. It is based on her own early experiences, and while it. book. Bookseller Inventory # ria9781853260919_rkm ISBN 10: 1853260916 ISBN 13: 9781853260919 Used Soft Cover Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Wordsworth Classics, UK, 1994. Soft Cover. Book Condition: Very Good-. Reprint.

PB, pictorial card covers, 196pp. General rubbing, creasing to covers, inside has tanning to page edges, else square, clean & tight. Size: 12mo - over 6¾" - 7¾" tall. Bookseller Inventory # jen004075 TO THE LIGHTHOUSE Woolf, Virginia Published by ( 2 other books by this author also available.) A paperback book. Daily shipping.> Wordsworth rpt.1995 (1995) Used ISBN 10: 0140622144 ISBN 13: 9780140622140 Used Paperback Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Penguin, 1996. Paperback. Book Condition: AVERAGE. Paperback; English language; a fair reading copy. Your book will be securely packed and promptly dispatched from our UK warehouse. For buyers outside the UK we now offer significantly lower rates on our airmail shipping.

Bookseller Inventory # 04098pbu039 ISBN 10: 1853260916 ISBN 13: 9781853260919 Used Paperback Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Wordsworth Editions, 2002. Paperback. Book Condition: GOOD. Paperback; English language; good condition. Your book will be securely packed and promptly dispatched from our UK warehouse. For buyers outside the UK we now offer significantly lower rates on our airmail shipping. Bookseller Inventory # 05924ric008 ISBN 10: 0140274162 ISBN 13: 9780140274165 Used Paperback Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Penguin, 1998. Paperback. Book Condition: AVERAGE. Paperback; English language; a fair reading copy. Your book will be securely packed and promptly dispatched from our UK warehouse. For buyers outside the UK we now offer significantly lower rates on our airmail shipping.

Bookseller Inventory # 07674jaj018 ISBN 10: 0099982102 ISBN 13: 9780099982104 Used Paperback Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Vintage, 1992. Paperback. Book Condition: AVERAGE. Paperback; English language; a fair reading copy. Your book will be securely packed and promptly dispatched from our UK warehouse. For buyers outside the UK we now offer significantly lower rates on our airmail shipping. Bookseller Inventory # 07758sal029 ISBN 10: 0192818163 ISBN 13: 9780192818164 Used Soft Cover Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Oxford University Press, UK, 1992. Soft Cover. Book Condition: Good+. Reprint. PB, pictorial card covers, 285pp. General rubbing, creasing to covers, inside has tanning to page edges, doodle lines to lower edge, else square, clean & tight.

Size: 12mo - over 6¾" - 7¾" tall. Bookseller Inventory # jen001700 ISBN 10: 1853260916 ISBN 13: 9781853260919 Used Soft Cover Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Wordsworth Classics, UK, 2002. Soft Cover. Book Condition: Very Good. PB, pictorial card covers, 159pp. Minor rubbing, creasing to covers, inside has tanning to page edges, else square, clean & tight, with no markings. New Introduction & Notes added 2002. Size: 12mo - over 6¾" - 7¾" tall. Bookseller Inventory # jen004686 Published by Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York (1955) Used Hardcover Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York, 1955. Hard Cover. Book Condition: Good. No Jacket. 1963 printing. Lacks jacket.

Pencil underlining and marginalia, boards lightly foxed. 236 pp. 8vo. "From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Virginia Woolf constructs a remarkable and moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life, and the conflict between male and female principles, in what is probably her most popular novel.". Bookseller Inventory # 2197653 ISBN 10: 0140185720 ISBN 13: 9780140185720 Used Mass Market Paperback ISBN 10: 0140274162 ISBN 13: 9780140274165 New PAPERBACK ISBN 10: 0156907399 ISBN 13: 9780156907392 Used Paperback Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Harvest Book/Harcourt Brace & Company, Publishers, 1989. Paperback. Book Condition: Good. No Jacket. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

Trade Paperback in Good Condition. Foreword by Eudora Welty. Gently used book that is clean and unmarked, cover with slight wear to extremities; lower front corner has faint wrinkle. Tight glued binding; internals clean and free from any markings, no creasing, lightly toned pages. The story of the daily life of an English family living in a summer house off the rocky coast of Scotland in the Hebrides and the challenges faced by that family, the Ramseys. Virginia Woolf (1882-194) was internationally acclaimed as a novelist, critic and stylist who "pushed the light of the English language a little further against darkness" (E.M.Forster). 209 pages. 5.3 x 8 inches. Harvest Book/Harcourt Brace & Company Publishers. San Diego, 1989. First Published 1927. Bookseller Inventory # 023006 Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Harvest Book/Harcourt Brace & Company, Publishers, 1989. Paperback. Book Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

Trade Paperback in Very Good Condition. Foreword by Eudora Welty. Clean and unmarked cover with trace wear to extremities; tight glued binding; internals very clean and free from any markings, no creasing. The daily life of an English family in the Hebrides. Virginia Woolf (1882-194) was internationally acclaimed as a novelist, critic and stylist who "pushed the light of the English language a little further against darkness" (E.M.Forster). 209 pages. 5.3 x 8 inches. 1989, Harvest Book/Harcourt Brace & Company Publishers. San Diego, CA, USA First Published 1927. Bookseller Inventory # 020763

Question: Who wrote the 1927 novel 'To the Lighthouse'?
Answer: VIRGINIA WOOLF